I read
Keith Lee Morris’s new novel Travelers
Rest, under perfect conditions:
during the recent Snowzilla snowstorm that shut down the DC area for several days.
Perfect conditions because of course there is no better time to sink into a
novel when you know you have all the time in the world, and perfect conditions
because the story takes place in a mysterious Idaho town where the Snow. Never.
Lets. Up. Ever.
Elegant
yet accessible prose, vivid characters with thoughtful POV shifts, swirling
snow carrying us through time, a creepy hotel…the writer in me was battling
with the reader in me. What will happen next!? And how did he do this!?
Lucky
for me, I know Keith, who has visited the Converse
low-res MFA program several times, including one summer where we ran
workshop together. He was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about the
book and offer some writing tips…and if you do nothing else today, you MUST
read his response to #6, where he reimagines The Great Gatsby in the age of smartphones. Hilarious!!
1. Describe your book in ten words or less.
(I’ll spot you the words of the title as freebies!)
Family explores old hotel, upsets fundamental balance of the
universe.
2. Much of the story in TRAVELERS REST takes
place during a major snowstorm, and the falling, whirling snow is described
many times, each time uniquely and elegantly. What advice can you give for
writers who struggle with descriptive writing? How did you approach writing
about this ongoing snowstorm and keep the writing fresh?
Because I'm one of those people who walks around with his
head in the clouds most of the time, physical description is always a challenge
for me. I don't pay much attention to physical detail as I go about my everyday
business, so I have to really force myself to concentrate on it in my writing.
The snow in Travelers Rest presented
an extreme version of the problem--I knew from the outset that the snow was
going to keep falling throughout the entire novel, and I knew that I was going
to try to use it as a way to both create the overall mood and explore the individual
characters’ perceptions. That meant I was going to end up describing it over
and over again, and I had to figure out
how to keep it interesting, to make the snow feel like a constant presence without
merely being repetitious. Add to that the problem that I now live in South
Carolina, where we only see snow once or twice a year.
Ultimately, my memories of growing up in Idaho came to my
rescue. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time standing at my bedroom window,
in the dark, watching the snow outside in the hope that enough would pile up for
school to be cancelled. I watched so often and so intensely (I really hated
school) that I got to be an expert on the finer points of drifting and falling
snow. When I had to write those descriptive passages in Travelers Rest, I would often just sit in a dark room and close my
eyes and go back to that place by my bedroom window as a child and channel
those memories; it was an exercise in making memories live in the present
moment, which, perhaps not coincidentally, turned out to be a very important
part of what the book is about.
As far as advice for younger writers goes, I’d say that
being good at physical description is just like everything else in writing
fiction—you have to be willing to slow down, concentrate fully, experience the
world you’re describing with your own senses, and stick with the moment doggedly
until you find just the right words to represent the tangible, real-world
subject you’re attempting to bring to life on the page.
3. The book balances four major points of
view. What advice do you have for those writers wishing to try multiple
viewpoints? Did the book start with four voices in your original vision?
To me, by far, the trickiest element to deal with when
you’re employing multiple POVS is not character, but plot. Yes—there’s always a
danger that one of your characters will simply be more compelling than the
others, or less compelling, so that readers find themselves becoming impatient
when they’re not reading about the characters or situations that most interest
them. I think that happens to some extent in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which is
one of my favorite novels published in the last few years, and was hugely
successful, obviously—but as much as I was absorbed in the movement of the
story, I couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of disappointment every time the
narration switched to the character that I found the least interesting of the
two. I was so caught up in one of the POVs that I didn’t want the author to
take me away from it.
But I think the hardest part of writing from multiple POVS is managing the timing and keeping the
plot from stalling out or becoming repetitive. There will, after all, almost
certainly be some overlap in the shifting POVS, and one challenge is to
navigate that overlap without making readers feel as if they’ve heard the same
thing before—the trick there, to me, is to make each of the POV characters’
experiences and thoughts distinct enough that going over the same ground from
inside one characters’ perspective feels almost nothing like covering that same
ground from another’s (Faulkner’s As I
Lay Dying is the quintessential example of how to do that effectively). And
of course you have to keep the plot from feeling like it’s bogging down.
Another challenge when you’re working with multiple
POVS—especially when that means as many as four or five—is to keep the
character present in the reader’s
experience of the story even when that character’s perspective isn’t being
represented. For instance, there’s a stretch of about 100 pages or more in Travelers Rest in which the father,
Tonio, doesn’t appear at all. That’s where the good old-fashioned notion of the
cliffhanger comes into play a little bit—if readers aren’t going to see or hear
from a character for a long time, it’s a good idea to leave that character in
an interesting predicament that readers won’t forget or become tired of
speculating about—it can even help to increase the tension, as long as you
don’t try to stretch the situation out too far, in which case it can become
frustrating or annoying.
4. I simply love 10-year-old Dewey! He’s
smart yet vulnerable and always 100% believable as a kid. So many young literary
characters feel overly-precocious and precious, but I never worried that Dewey
was going to disappoint me. How did you capture him so wonderfully? Any tips
for writing about kids?
You know, I wish I had some really great secret to impart
here, but I don’t. I don’t write about kids a whole lot, so I’m happy to hear
you say that you liked Dewey. It helps, of course, to have raised kids
yourself, or to be in the process of raising kids yourself. [Note: I do not
recommend procreation for the sole purpose of writing more believable
elementary school characters]. One thing I’ve always felt is that you shouldn’t
try overtly to make children sound like children—just stay true to what kids do
and think and let them interact more or less like adults, like your other
characters. Nothing’s worse than a five-year-old character who prefaces
everything she says with shouts of “Mooommmmy! Daaaaadddy!” Kids don’t do that
anyway. It also really helps in writing child characters, I think, if you have
vivid memories of your own childhood and can recollect clearly how you thought
and felt at a particular age. But that’s obviously not something you can teach
anyone.
5. Why did you choose to include the
supernatural element in this story? Was that your intention from the start, or
something that showed up along the way that you initially embraced/feared?
For about twenty years, I’ve been writing what I like to
call “dream stories”—narratives that are based loosely on actual dreams and
that adhere to a kind of dream logic rather than what we think of as the
operating principles of the everyday world. Travelers
Rest was just the extension of that mode to novel-length form. I was
shocked, honestly, when people started referring to it as a genre novel or even
a cross-genre novel—that never occurred to me. I was just writing the same kind
of fiction I’d been writing for a long time and publishing in literary
magazines. There’s definitely something otherworldly in the novel, if not downright
supernatural (I guess I’d be hard-pressed to explain the distinction between
those two terms, but the first one sounds more appropriate to me for some
reason), but the way I thought of it the whole time was that the characters
were lost in an elaborate dream that nevertheless had real-world consequences.
6. Technology had to be part of the challenge
when putting this plot together, dispensing with cellphones and the like. Any
thoughts about how modern technology helps/hinders writers today as they
consider plot?
Oh, God, yes, this is one of my favorite things to whine
about! 90% of the conflicts in literary history can be resolved in five minutes
or less with a cell phone. Gatsby and Daisy have been in touch all these years
as Facebook friends, so when he gets to West Egg he already has her number in
his contacts list. He shoots her a text and she asks Siri for directions and
heads right over. Meanwhile, Nick Carraway has run a Google search on Gatsby
and turned up his past criminal history and fake identity and tweets something
about how his new neighbor is f-ed up. Daisy follows her cousin Nick on
Twitter, so she sees the tweet and aborts her trip, opting to call up her
husband and Jordan Baker on speaker phone and propose a round of golf instead.
The End.
Of course, one solution to the problem is to fully embrace
technology and social media, keep up with all the latest trends and be able to
employ them artfully in your work, but for this you need access to a
7-year-old. I only have an 18-year-old at home, and he’s long since grown tired
of my ineptitude, so that he now answers my questions about technology with
nothing but three-letter texts from behind the bathroom door, where he’s blow
drying his hair—lol, idk, wtf? And then of course if you do go this route,
unless you publish your story or novel online immediately upon completion of a
first draft, everything you wrote will be outdated and all but indecipherable,
capable of being dredged up only from the deepest caverns of cultural memory,
by the time it ever gets to its first reader.
So yes, in this case, with Travelers Rest, it seemed essential to get rid of most forms of
contemporary technology, and my editor, Ben George, and I spent way more time
than probably either of us wanted to talking about what would happen in the
magnetically charged atmosphere of the town of Good Night, Idaho (which was the
explanation I came up with for why things don’t operate normally) if you were
to, say, plug in a toaster. The problem did lead to some fun scenes,
though—like the ones in which everyone in town keeps refusing Tonio’s credit
cards, or how Robbie (Dewey’s derelict uncle) finds all the old 70s songs on
the town’s one ancient jukebox.
About Keith Lee
Morris
Keith Lee Morris is the author of two previous novels, The Greyhound God and The Dart League King, a Barnes &
Noble Discover pick. His short stories have been published in New Stories from the South, Tin House, A
Public Space, New England Review, and Southern
Review, which awarded him its Eudora Welty Prize in fiction. Morris lives
in South Carolina, where he is a professor of creative writing at Clemson
University.
